


The Jetty

by brightephemera



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Slapstick, leeches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:49:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27895585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brightephemera/pseuds/brightephemera
Summary: Cullen opens up to a listening Lavellan. Continuation of the game scene.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Cullen Rutherford
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	The Jetty

Cullen had given his good-luck charm coin to Isten, and Isten hadn’t laughed at him. His fears drew back, the way they often did when she was around.

Now she leaned on a post on the little wooden jetty of his memories, just opposite him. The evening was warm. The insects beat loudly against their little bubble, all except the fireflies that silently floated in their own inscrutable patterns at the forest’s edge. Beyond and around, the pond had laid out a carpet of lilypads studded with luminous white waterlilies.

Isten was wearing a yellow dress cinched tight around her soft waist. She was part of it, with the lilies, with the evening star just over the treetops. He shook his head. “Having you here…I come here to clear my head. I come here for peace. And you’re in the middle of it.”

She looked guilty. “Making noise.”

“No, you are…right, being here. Nothing’s ever been this right before.”

The place was still. She looked around. She took a deep, contented breath. “Tell me about what happened here,” she said in her irresistible silver voice. “Tell me what you dreamed when you looked out over the water. Tell me if you really have ducks with some ridiculous crest that makes their heads twice as big as they’re supposed to be.”

“Oh, we do. Mergansers, they’re called. I’ll point one out if I spot one.”

She chuckled softly. “And the rest?”

He tried. “I wanted to be a Templar. I gave no thought to l…women. I failed to foresee you.”

“A boy running about in the woods, pretending to nullify magic?”

“And wave swords. That part was very important.”

“What did your siblings think of it all?”

“My brother understood. My sisters…well, they always had their own way. You would like them.” Free association took hold. “You know, my eldest sister could name every plant and insect within three miles with notes on foods and poisons. Sometimes my younger sister and I would invent ridiculous names and use them just to bother her. ‘Let’s bring Mother some stripey wobblewort.’ It would drive her up the wall.”

She echoed his laugh. “Bully.”

“What are children for, if not to terrorize their brethren?”

“You don’t like children?”

He chuckled. “I didn’t say that.”

“Do you get to come here often?”

“It didn’t occur to me to. Not until I realized there was someone I wanted to…let in. I didn’t come here after Kinloch Hold. I was still wounded, still…unclean. In retrospect I wish I’d come. Even if I didn’t see my family, I could have found some solace here.”

“We can come back any time you want.”

“You don’t know how many strings I had to pull to spare us this time.” He closed his eyes and inhaled. The gentle green scent of pond and forest relaxed him, permeated to his bones. “It’s possible I don’t need to.”

“There’s this moment.” Her dark eyes were bright and wondering. “Despite the risks, despite the stupid danger I put you in.”

“This moment,” he said. “Despite the risks that I walked into. Isten,” and he took her chin between forefinger and thumb to hold her attention as tight as he dared, “when I look at you, I see a world that for the first time in my life I could have. And I can’t find it in myself to fear it.”

Her smile wobbled and firmed. She pressed up to her toes and he kissed her. She held him like taking a stand against the whole world again. It was right.

She pulled away. Her eyes looked huge. She took his hand and tugged, settling toward to the boards.

He squeezed her hand and resisted. “Mm. Leeches get on top here all the time.”

Isten snapped to her feet. “Noted,” she mumbled, and tried to brush down her back.

Cullen walked slowly around her, absorbed for a moment as he scanned her back and her arms for signs of parasites. She paid rapt attention, with probably more worry than leeches merited. “You look fine,” he said. And instantly regretted the phrasing. He rushed to look at her face rather than her other end. “I mean, you’re clear.”

“Cullen.” Maybe she was smiling too much, or maybe he was. It made an exact kiss fit difficult. “I am counting,” she whispered, and kissed, “the number of kisses before it will be proper for me to ask you improper things.”

It was the most explicit she had ever gotten in their leisurely mutual orbit. Maybe there was a history, maybe neither one of them had come to this unimprinted by the past, but this was new and her smile was shy. Oh, and it spared him the dozen laughably bad seductions he had managed to come up with. “Oh?” he managed. “How many more?”

“A dozen or thereabouts. We’ve been doing this for a little while.”

“You don’t seem that frustrated.”

She kissed him. “Eleven.”

“Really?”

Still tender, and it came off not as strained control on her part but as a boundless, serene confidence. “Ten.”

He helped. “Nine.”

A long kiss. She smiled. “All right, that’s eight and seven.”

“Six.”

They looked one another in the eye. They raced to zero.

“Sh.” She gave him one more kiss, petal soft. “All right. Now I’m asking something improper.”

His heart leaped like he’d never done this before. “How can you be so sure?”

“I believe in you.” There was something of the Inquisitor’s firmness, and more of Isten Lavellan’s gentle fascination. “I believe you wouldn’t lead me on if you didn’t think this was right. I believe that someone, somehow, put us in each other’s reach, and it would be foolish to discard that. I believe…don’t you?”

“When you’re here, anything is possible.” He backed up to keep drinking her in while reaching dry land. “Now we—”

He was aware of the idea of him tripping backwards and falling in a very distant sense, and then the pond’s muddy water had him. His boots were unbelievably heavy, but after some kicking the ground was under his feet; the water was only chest deep here. He waded out of the wreckage of his dignity.

“Are you all right?” Isten was all concern. “I’ll start a fire.”

His cheeks should do fine for that. “We used to swim like that,” he said stiffly. “And let the leeches fall where they may.”

She was on her knees on a bare patch of dry ground. She got a flame going in a handful of pine needles. “Hand me something dry.”

He dripped. “Are you serious?”

She looked up, startled. Then she laughed her rich rippling laugh. “I’ll get something. Take off your coat.”

In short order she had a decent-sized log burning. When he got to his trousers and undershirt Isten stopped him. “Let me check you. As I recall, leeches are pretty opportunistic.”

“Don’t I know it,” he groaned.

She turned him around. Her intense attention on every inch of his skin compelled his own. “I’m going to pull one,” she said. Right, that was less compelling.

He felt the zipping sting of a parasite being peeled away from his shoulder. “Ugh, I usually favor kindness to animals, but….”

“It’ll be fine without us.” She threw the leech toward the pond. She got one more, on his upper arm. She paused. Then started moving her hands over his back, lightly. She pinched a wetted fold of his shirt. “You could take this off,” she murmured.

The night was warm, the place was quiet, but outside the context of Wicked Grace he had never…revealed, that much, to her.

She seemed to accept something he hadn’t said. “Never mind,” she said, and walked around him. She was blushing. “Do you want help rigging up your other things?”

“No, that’s fine. I’m fine. You never—this thing is wet.” His shirt tried to stick as he pulled it off. “I’ll manage this.” He dropped the wet shirt on top of his soaked coat and took a moment to just toast at the fire. “You worry about your tent.”

She did not immediately worry about her tent. “You are…very pleasant to look at.”

“Hm.” The woman could outtalk him in three languages and sounded just then like she was struggling to master words. “The women who say that are rarely of your caliber.”

“Well, at least you know their eyes work.”

“This is not the topic I was expecting.”

She laughed. “Go on, fix your clothes.” Cullen took a deep breath and gathered sticks to prop his outer clothes on. His boots he posted on standing sticks; his coat took a little more engineering, but he got it.

Then, finally, he went to get his own tent in place.

“Come here,” Isten said from her tent. Her voice sounded strange. Oh, no, he hadn’t gotten anything on her, had he?

Her tent was spacious. He could note that, in some rational corner of his mind.

“Come in,” she said.

Isten was already laid out, her head held above her hard little pillow…her body covered only with an embroidered slip. He looked at her bare shoulders and her very bare curled-up legs.

“Solidarity?” she said innocently.

He crawled in beside her, focusing on tiny things. The crinkle at the bend of her elbow. The softness of her belly under the curve of her little slip. The way her black hair caught the reach of the firelight, there where she lay between light and shadow, between who she was and who she had to be.

“You know,” he said, and coughed. “You know, I always imagined a bed would be involved. In a general sense.”

“We can wait,” she whispered.

She had worn down nations with that patience. Cullen did not consider himself a nation, and reasoned that he could justify being less difficult to conquer with such a figure at the gate. Damp and tense and brimming with joy, he took her in his arms like they had practiced, and accelerated.


End file.
